The Big Fix

by Tracey Helton Mitchell

  I was self-conscious of the weight I’d gained since getting off heroin. I almost refused his offer. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll hurt you?” I said with feigned nonchalance.

  He gave me a gentle smile. How could I refuse? As I moved to sit down, he slowly put his arm around me and drew me in. With his embrace I experienced a feeling so strange to me. I felt not only secure but also invited. For the first time I felt like a puzzle piece that fit without the aid of drugs.

  The next day Christian didn’t call. How many times had I convinced myself that a guy really cared only to find out differently? Here I was, nearly thirty years old, and I had never been in a healthy romantic relationship. Not one. While jumping in and out of station wagons, turning tricks with men with wedding rings and car seats in the back, I had given up any illusion that real love existed. In truth, my main relationship had been with heroin. The drug was a huge part of my life for so many years, consuming my energy as no person could. But I had moved on. I felt ready to open up to the possibility that I was wrong about love. Could it really exist? I had to have faith it would come to me when I was ready for it. I was willing to put my trust in the universe. I could navigate my life with faith instead of constant doubt. I decided not to spend my week chained to the phone waiting for it to ring. He was much younger. I wouldn’t take it personally if he never called.

  When Christian eventually called, we talked on the phone for two hours. It was like high school should have been. Our conversation was easy; there were no awkward gaps, no silences. At this point in my life, I suffered from what I call ODD, over-disclosure disorder. I figured it was easier to tell someone everything right away to protect myself from rejection. Better to put it out there up front. Christian listened to me ramble about the gory details of my past without judgment.

  Finally I ran out of steam.

  “Are you done?” he asked. I was taken aback by this. Had I said too much? Was I scaring him away?

  He sensed my confusion and said, “You seem like you have a lot to say. I just want to make sure you got it all out.”

  We agreed to go see the movie Gladiator the day before my thirtieth birthday. When we got to the theater, I felt nervous and expectant. My dress was as tight as my shoes. I surprised myself. I could speak in front of a room of one hundred people and talk about being a junkie, yet when I was walking with him, the butterflies in my stomach made me practically forget my name. This was new. I loved it. We held hands in the dark theater, and two hours into the movie, he kissed me.

  “Why did you wait so long?” I asked.

  “I was working my courage up to it,” he said. “Plus I knew how much time I had left.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “I already saw this movie.”

  We laughed and I kissed him again. In all my past relationships, I would eventually feel like I was somehow using this person, which made me feel dirty. Not with Christian. I felt I was in unfamiliar territory, but I didn’t feel afraid. Instead I felt innocent.

  I invited him to come home with me. As we curled up in my single bed in my tiny room at the sober living house, I realized love was not the drama that it came with during my active addiction. No one needed to scream under my window or follow me for miles to “win me back.” Love can be quiet and supportive. I thought I had been in love many times, but I saw now that it was the drugs pulling sick people together. I learned from living on the street to sleep with one eye open. Tonight I clung to the feeling of security as my eyes grew heavy. In that bed, the two of us pressed against each other to keep from falling off. This felt like something worth having. I held on tight.

  Chapter 8

  I DON’T DESERVE HAPPINESS

  “You guys have an empty room?” my friend asked as she toured the apartment.

  I nodded. “Yes, but I can’t think of anything I want to put in there. I use it as a yoga room.”

  “A yoga room?” she asked. “Since when do you do yoga? I thought you hated it.”

  I felt the effects of foot-in-mouth disease. I am well-known for this condition. I had talked so much shit in the past about yoga, but I tend to hate anything new—or at least I think I do.

  “In fact,” she continued, “you told me it was hippie-dippy bullshit, as I recall.”

  I swiped my shoulder to indicate I was brushing off her comments. “I am evolving as a person, Mary,” I countered. “Besides, it is hippie-dippy bullshit.” I just hope it is hippie-dippy bullshit that actually works, I think to myself. I had stopped eating meat and quit eating fast food. In terms of self-care, yoga seemed like the next logical step.

  I pointed down the hall to guide her toward the living room. As she followed me, I added, “I don’t really have anything to put in there anyway. They didn’t teach me interior design at Crack High.” I was learning that there were so many things a person needed to fill out an apartment. I was never into material possessions, just survival.

  We walked toward the back of the apartment. She had a seat on our couch. I hesitated to tell her where it had come from. Nearly all the furniture in the apartment had been the possessions of people who died in assisted living. I was not sure if a person actually died on the couch, but I could picture it. It was so darn comfy, it seemed like as good a place as any. These items were passed on to us when the family passed on claiming them. I could see why. They made me feel strange at times, wondering if Aunt Edna had kept her special newspapers in the same spot in the dresser drawer where I now had my checkbook and my vibrator.

  I was ashamed to admit that suburban life made me uncomfortable. I hated to talk to anyone about it, because it made me seem ungrateful. I had hit upon a needle in the San Francisco haystack. I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited some more, until finally an opportunity came along to rent the bottom half of a house in one of the nicer areas of the city. Christian and I—living together by now—had a friend who wanted someone he trusted to live below his grandmother. We jumped at the chance, wholly unprepared for the change. For me, it was as if I had been transported to the moon. There were birds chirping, fruit trees in the yard, and a neighborhood cat that needed to be petted upon my arrival home. I was used to rats and roaches, not the pleasant banter of songbirds at 6:00 AM. I was supposed to know something about hanging curtains. I compromised by taking an ugly sheet and nailing it into the walls to cover the window.

  This new life could be a real challenge. I had to relearn a laundry list of skills. I had to learn how to cuddle again, to trust having a person sleep next to me night after night. It was hard to stop sleeping with a knife under my pillow. It was also highly unattractive to have jail flashbacks in the middle of brunch. I had to stop devouring my food in less than two minutes or face being ostracized by my companions. I slowly learned to carry a purse. Apparently, an over-thirty-year-old woman reaching into her sweaty bra to pull out money was not socially acceptable with the not-on-drugs set. I also had to stop calling women bitches. “Bitch” is just a term I used when a person was female and I didn’t know her name. It wasn’t a value judgment to say “that bitch over there” or “Who is that bitch?” Nevertheless, a coworker sat me down to express her displeasure with my description of someone. Finally, I had to learn at work functions that some people can actually drink and enjoy the taste. I had switched jobs around the same time that I switched apartments. I was now working at a free methadone clinic at a hospital. I had been inspired by the passing of Jake. I worked with a mixed crowd of nurses, doctors, social workers, and counselors. At the holiday party, I learned that some people bring a bottle of wine and don’t drink it all. Or they may even leave it for the host or hostess. To top it off, not everyone rummages through medicine cabinets. I still believe that holiday party needed to end with a Breathalyzer. We should have brought one in from the clinic—there was plenty of overindulgence that made me feel at home, even if I wasn’t the one making a minor fool of myself.

  Things between Christian and me had hit a comfortable stride. At five
years, this was my longest relationship, healthy or unhealthy, ever. He worked, I worked. We took vacations. We visited his family or my family on major holidays. My mother loved Christian—LOVED, as she would say in exaggerated terms for emphasis. After a rocky start, my father warmed up to him. The first day they met, my father sat right next to Christian on the couch and completely ignored his existence. After a few days, my father saw the light after Christian tolerated both his occasional off-color joke and his excessive drinking. At the airport, he shook Christian’s hand and told him, “You are a real asshole, but I like you.” That was his attempt at connection. Christian won my heart as he leaned in and joked, “Now I understand why you wanted to leave home.” Yes! Finally someone who truly understood me.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t love my parents. They were certainly . . . different from me. In my youth, I had made no effort to understand them. As time went on, I decided to accept them as they were, as they had tried to accept me. The more I took responsibility for my own actions, the less time I spent being critical of others, including my parents. While they would never like my fashion choices or those “damn tattoos” as my mother called them, for the first time in my adult life they respected me. There is a saying, “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” My whole family and I loved to argue when we thought we were right. We also discovered ways to navigate our differences to find a way to be happy with each other.

  I was plugging away in graduate school (I had earned my bachelor’s degree and started right away on my master’s), and still going to twelve-step meetings, although my attendance had decreased over time. In the first five years I would go to meetings three to five days per week. Now, I only tried to make it once a weekend. To try to keep up on all our friendships, we had even started hosting monthly social events at our house, with a mixture of my recovery friends and Christian’s bandmates. Life was good for us. But something seemed to be missing. There had to be more to life than school, work, brunch, and nightlife. Our apartment felt empty. Our life felt like it was missing something. We had talked a little about having a child, but it never seemed as if it was the right time.

  “There is never a right time to have a baby,” my mother told me.

  I scratched my head as I adjusted the phone. “Well, how will I know, Mom, when I’m ready?”

  She laughed. “Well jeez, Tracey. You are already in your mid-thirties.” She let an awkward pause hang in the air for emphasis. “How much longer do you think you can wait?”

  Her words repeated in my mind. They stung me. Was my super-conservative mother suggesting I have a baby out of wedlock with my much younger boyfriend? I guess she was . . .

  “You aren’t getting any younger,” she told me with a serious tone.

  I was almost offended by this, except I knew she was right. Damn.

  Christian and I went on a romantic getaway in Sonoma County. This was our six-year anniversary trip. Our anniversary is the day before my birthday, so we were here to celebrate the two events at one time. We decided on a cozy bed-and-breakfast with a hot tub in our room. The place was slightly janky—much different from the pictures—but I think that made us feel more at home. We brought our dog Sadie, one of our fur children. First there was Smokey the cat, the rescue from a senior citizen in distress. Next came Stephanie the kitten from the SPCA. I had thought Smokey might be lonely. I was wrong. Last came Sadie Girl. She was a rescue from Hurricane Katrina. I was not allowed to get any more animal companions. I loved having that unconditional love in my life, but friends told me they worried that I was going to hit crazy-cat-lady status without an intervention.

  It was so nice to get out of the city. The area where I worked was known for the collection of human waste strewn about the doorways. I had discovered this myself one morning as I took Sadie on a long walk to the area. Getting out with her was my stress relief. At that time, I was working full time at the hospital-based methadone clinic, giving out naloxone (which can help reverse an overdose in progress) at a needle exchange, and going to school part time at night. This had been my grind for years. If my schedule wasn’t overloaded, it felt empty. Even with the constant obligations, many times I still felt like my life was not headed in the right direction. All this work, yet I was missing a family. I loved my animals, but I felt like it might be time to take the next step. I thought I was incapable of taking care of anyone besides myself, but my furry friends had given me a little more confidence in myself. As the dog curled up next to me, I looked at my pack of birth control pills. Birth control was the only drug I had taken in the past eight years. I had been vigilant.

  I had always wanted a child, but it came to feel like an impossibility during my using days. It took many years to get to where I felt stable enough to support myself. Then I found Christian. I was not searching for the love of my life. In the random cosmic joke called dating, I had actually found someone. Finding the right partner was a happy accident. I worried that trying for a baby would tempt fate. I was getting up there in years. Maybe the disappointment would be more than I could handle.

  I could see Christian enjoying the breeze flowing into the back of the cabin.

  “When we get back to San Francisco I am done with my pills,” I announced.

  I was saying this to the universe. I am just going to do it.

  He nodded his head and said, “I told you ‘Okay’ a year ago.” Truth!

  When I hit thirty-five, the slow tick of the biological clock became a humming in my ears. At thirty-six, it became a crashing thunder. I had a good job—not great, but perfect for me while I finished graduate school. I had been doing counseling since I was nine months clean, working my way up the ladder into a job with decent benefits and pay. I was not entirely sure this was the “right time,” but I didn’t know how much time I had left to decide. It seemed as if every magazine I read said something about my expiring eggs. It was pure evil—this decision-making process. How long could a woman wait and reasonably expect to be able to have a child?

  About a month after the Sonoma trip, I woke up feeling uneasy. I had been feeling the same way for a few days. I assumed it was normal Monday blues until the feeling dragged into Wednesday. Suddenly I felt so tired, the type of tired that wasn’t quelled by a second or third cup of coffee. I couldn’t have another anyway. My stomach was queasy. Since the trip, I had diligently scoured the Internet in search of information about how long it would take me to get pregnant. Nevertheless, when I got to work and Googled my symptoms, my heart jumped out of my chest. Could I be pregnant so soon? There was no fucking way this could be possible.

  I never got pregnant during my addiction. Not once. This made me skeptical now that I was actually trying. Condoms and drug use do not always go hand in hand. While I’d been good about using condoms with my customers, my boyfriends were another story. More than one tested positive without telling me. HIV had killed most of my friends at a time when there was no medication. My friends were told they were going to die. Unfortunately, this did not stop me from risky behavior. I had to deal with thinking I had HIV more than one time. That seemed to go with the territory. But pregnancy? Never. I was frequently tested at health clinics. I never had a positive test. I barely even had a period. Six months, a year, another eight months of no periods was par for the course.

  Strangely, the first person I thought of was my mother. Shouldn’t I be thinking of my partner? He couldn’t take my call anyway, I told myself. My mind was racing. What would I tell my mother if it was true? What would she think? It was one thing to talk about having a kid. It was an entirely different matter to actually be pregnant. Could she imagine me as a mother? She had seen the worst of me when I had gone home once in the depths of my addiction. It was a week after my brother’s wedding. I fucked that whole thing up by showing up back at home for the first time in two or three years a week after the ceremony. I had gotten distracted. I am not sure how I ever made it to the airport. I did a “farewell to San Francisco” hit of spe
ed before I got on the airplane. I was so paranoid the whole flight that I drank booze to take the edge off the voices I was hearing. I arrived at the airport in Kentucky geezed out of my mind. Suddenly I realized I had no idea how I was going to get to West Chester, which was in the next state and forty minutes away. My parents knew I was coming, but both of them were going to be out of town. My father had taken a side job working in a coal mine. My mother was on a long-planned vacation. Getting home was going to take some effort, especially since I had spent the last of my money on drugs and that plane booze.

  Somehow, I ended up taking a free hotel shuttle to downtown Cincinnati. Then, tweaking out of my mind, I walked eight miles from downtown to a place where I could catch a bus toward the suburbs. I walked through all the worst areas of my former home city. I saw the old buildings that look like burned-out bomb shelters, a methadone clinic, and a pharmacy of known ill repute that would sell you codeine cough syrup without a prescription. I passed by all sorts of dead-end alleys and housing projects with gated exits. Many of my friends had gotten lost in there. It seemed like they would never make it out. San Francisco was my personal mousetrap. It was amazing that I had extracted myself to come on this trip.

  At a gas station, I hitchhiked the rest of the way to my parents’ house, far from the city. Their street was dark, and the only night creatures I saw were animals, not people. But when I got to the house, I nearly peed my pants when I saw the shadow people waiting for me on the back porch. Meth has a unique set of bugaboos that come on after sleep deprivation sets in. I would see mystery people out of the corner of my eye. Only this time, it wasn’t a shadow. My mother had a life-sized cutout of Billy Ray Cyrus of “Achey Breaky Heart” fame on the back porch. His mullet drove me from the house. I was so uncomfortable that I turned around and walked a mile to the gas station to get a Dr. Pepper. When I got up the courage, I made my way back, went inside, and fell into my old bed. I felt like a child again, with very adult problems.